Part 6 (Excerpts)

Arizona is not a recourse state, so chances are you will not owe 1099 C Income

In Arizona, typically its not a recourse state, so if they are telling you that theyre going to garnish your wages because you didnt pay back your entire mortgage, there is a local bank ,that was threatening a very good colleague of ours about a small second mortgage that person had taken out. Threatening to send it to collections and garnish her wages. It simply isn’t going to happen.

But nevertheless, there is still the tax implications that apply, if you need to navigate through this maze. There is a lot to it, you need to protect yourself. You talked about bankruptcy is one of those exclusions, right? One of the problems with bankruptcy is people dont understand the bankruptcy laws. They are so tight now and your feet are really held to the fire from the federal government right now. It’s not like you just didn’t make your mortgage payment, so you go file bankruptcy, it’s just not realistic. Assuming bankruptcy is the last resort option for everybody. And we certainly want to avoid that, it would not be sound financial advice from any credible source that I can think of.

Let’s walk through a case scenario, somebody who is listening to this broadcast, their head is spinning right now, they’re thinking, oh my gosh. I should have known about the tax implications, a short sale versus loan modification. Let’s start at the top and work through a quick scenario. And then we’ll point out the specifics of what they should be considering right now.

For example, we talk about this all the time and to your credit Michael Barnes and to Velocity Financials credit, you were early in bringing out the loan modification for people who were in a distress situation regarding a mortgage, maintaining or keeping up with the mortgage payment. So you started going down the path where the refinance started to become a much more difficult option, with new constraints and all the other factors that led to part of this economic crisis, a loan modification has become a buzz topic today. Driving to the station today, driving down Camelback Road, I see a sign on the corner. You know, one of those stick in the ground, homemade jobs, that says don’t refi a Loan, modify, with some success rate and the phone number.

Hang on there I want you to say the success rate. The sign literally said, 99% success rate, and it goes back to the point that you made when they say that they can reduce your mortgage principal by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, thats the absolute last resort for any lending institution. Thats not what this is about, so let’s start with that, then we will work on the tax ramifications of how that might work in the overall financial strategy.

I am familiar with the loan modification industry here in Arizona. There is no regulation, unfortunately. We at Velocity Financial work with a national network of attorneys, so if you’re the guy in El Centro California, or youre in Phoenix, or youre in Alaska it doesn’t matter where you’re at. We have someone who is an expert in that field in that state because the laws are different. But without the regulations some person with the ugly yellow sign on the side of the road says he has a 99% success rate, I don’t believe him it’s probably not using an attorney, who knows, dont buy into that garbage. Were going to tell you the truth, if we cant do a loan modification, we will tell you that we cant do it. And if a loan modification is not the best thing for you, you can find the some of these other options.

Duration : 0:5:19

[youtube 6OiLZa8op3Q]

Duration : 0:5:2

[youtube aDScazdMQxE]

Attorney Negotiated Home Loan Mortgage Modification, Loss Mitigation Process – Alternative to Foreclosure Fraud and Scams. Our Service will Help you Survive the Mortgage Meltdown Crisis. Avoid Foreclosure and Bankruptcy. Get your Bailout with our Home Loan Mortgage Modification Loss Mitigation Prevention Process Today.

Duration : 0:1:56

[youtube wgcuGSU_O0o]

If you have reviewed the “Obama Plan” and find that you can’t qualify for their loan modfication plan, your next phone call should be to me. The loan modifications we get are not limited to the guidelines of the “Obama plan.” Not to mention, the government is not giving you a Forensic Loan Audit as part of their Mortgage Modification but at
www.2ModMyLoan.com we do.

Duration : 0:5:6

[youtube YvKmOWMeWSw]

Part 5 (Excerpt)

The Loss Mitigation Department at the Bank is not on your side

Welcome back once again my guest Brett Fallon, Brett is a regular guest on the show, he is a registered financial consultant with RG Capitol and AIG Financial Advisors Brett W Fallon welcome back to the show.

It is nice to have the financial advisors perspective on some of these things so many people dont have a financial advisor so for thousands and thousands of people listening right now you are their only option for that, financial advisory services are typically not for the masses but again you are here to help and your services are available to quite a number of people you actually work with fortune 500 companies is that correct?

Yes, I do a number of workshops for fortune 500 companies that are headquartered here around the valley, the idea is to help people create efficiency with all assets, understanding that their home and home mortgage is typically the largest asset that most Americans have and if you are not treating that with efficiency, the retirement accounts and investments accounts, and all the other stuff has to work in concert, so Im happy to weigh in with information and give you my viewpoints and my perspective.

We were talking just a few moments ago about utilizing an expert negotiator when trying to do a loan modification, people are getting mail from bogus service sources, we have already covered that, but from their servicers saying if you need help with your mortgage, help is here, give us a call. Im certainly not going to tell everyone in the world that they cant do their own loan modification because some people are qualified to negotiate on their own behalf, though in my opinion they will still be emotionally attached to it and if they hear something that sounds good, it may be enough for them to essentially bite at the offer which is exactly what the loss mitigation department wants you to do.

It goes back to the disinterested third party, that expert negotiator, negotiator being the key word in that phrase. One of the things we were talking about and I want to make sure that we address this especially in this segment, we are talking about loan modification of mortgages of people that have some financial constraints, some pressure whatever the source of pain is, for them knowing that this option exists to take an existing mortgage loan and modify it to their best or better interest, from what it currently is, so who should and who should not do a loan modification, lets start with that.

Ill tell you and lets start with people who shouldnt do a loan modification. Someone who thinks their interest rate is too high and owes more than the house is worth, feels that they are entitled to a loan modification, is not really a good enough reason or a hard enough hardship for those types of people unfortunately. This is essentially a handout that is being offered because of some of the malpractices, if you will, that were happening within the mortgage industry over the last several years.

With these big huge banks offering these products that were teaser loans, toxic mortgages, as we call them now. We certainly didnt call them that then when the consumer calls me up and says I want that 1% loan thats going to be my ticket. Unfortunately people took theses loans but what they didnt realize is that someday this loan with the ridiculously low interest was going to reset and their payment was going to quadruple and who on earth could have known that the economic times would be as bad as they are and they would have no option to get out of these loans.

So someone who simply finds themselves upside down on their home, owing more on the house than the actual value of the house, does not necessarily need to consider a loan modification. No they may not qualify on those merits alone in most cases.

I just want to make a point, I was reading an article in the wall Street Journal about this stuff and basically the gist of the article was that the average foreclosure on any property in the United States costs the lender $50, 000 from start to finish…

Duration : 0:5:26

[youtube zIjxpZ9klq8]

Part 6 (Excerpt)

Using Retirement Funds to pay your Mortgage is just a bad idea Get a Loan Modification

So it doesnt matter if it is a $100,000 property or a $500,000 property the cost to the lender is $50,000 on the average nationally.

So the idea of the upside down scenario, you may see banks more willing to entertain a broader audience of loan modifications or a broader request of loan modifications based on the fact that they know that now, what we are calling toxic assets, not only exist on their balance sheets, but they want to do something to avoid the additional cost of foreclosing on the property, to avoid the additional impact on our economy nationally with all these foreclosures mounting. So a loan modification that may not be the best or most ideal candidate today, dont throw the option completely out of the window.

And to that point I would never tell a home owner to stop making their payments just to get a better loan modification, because as of today, this may not be the case two weeks or two months from now, but as of today, your servicer is not going to entertain a loan modification unless youre late in most cases. Heres the situation, though at first you may get mad at that and they get mad at me for it, but the reality of it is we have a real problem now with lots of people who are two, three, four months behind on their mortgages, this loan modification we are jumping in, we are getting attorneys involved and getting right in front of the asset managers or the attorneys for the servicers to get these foreclosure proceedings stopped.

Im absolutely certain that in the foreseeable future they are going to allow people that are not late yet to do these loan modifications, hold on, I said I would never tell a home owner to not make their mortgage payment to get a loan modification, the other thing I would never tell a homeowner to do, never ever, is to take money out of your 401K to pay their mortgage payment because you cant go forward.

There are other stops in place, if you dont make your mortgage payment because of hard times you are going to get a loan modification. I talked to a guy the other day that had a 23 year, huge 6 figure income, he lost his job, big huge firm here in the valley, he is probably listening to the show right now, this guy drained his entire 401K, I mean a huge one, just to make his mortgage payments.

And the average 401K participant, investor, does not understand the ramification of what that is, just because your company plan allows you to take a loan against your 401K doesnt mean it is the right thing to do. There are ramifications beyond our time and the scope of this discussion regarding that decision. Loan modification first, if you are taking money from a 401K to make a house payment you are not only inefficient in creating the velocity of money but you are costing yourself in penalties, taxes, and that is certainly something we can be forthright about talking with anyone who wants to call.

And in this case the poor guy used up every dime of his 401K because his lender told him NO, NO, NO, three separate times because he was not late, well he wasnt going to allow that to happen. Unfortunately knowing what he knows now he would have looked at it differently.

Loan Modification is not for someone who has no income at all, the investor, the servicer, the bank that holds your mortgagee is not willing to do a loan modification because you dont have the means to pay. Even if it is a modified loan, you still cant make the payment. Right in some cases where you have significant cash reserves, but I have not seen one of those done.

That wouldnt be the ideal candidate, describe a little bit about who should be doing this loan modification and I know we are getting close to a break but people need to know that this option exists. They are hearing all these different concepts in the news and they are hearing in the media the spin about Hank Paulson and what the treasury is doing, and hearing about this bailout package and what that represents, and now they are hearing that the money is not going to be used to buy back bad loans, and mortgages, bad assists. So what does that do to the underlying holder of that mortgage? The owner of that house?

It is pretty scary for the majority of them, the loan modification lenders are getting very aggressive when being approached with a lawsuit or being addressed by an attorney, receiving a subpoena in regard to a specific loan case. They are paying attention to that and those are the people who are going to be getting the best options at this time…

Duration : 0:6:12

[youtube akfthbZ6EGs]

Part 3 (Excerpt)

Beware of phishing schemes and bank scams GMACs clients hit hard

As promised just before the break, I told you to, listen in if you know anyone who has a GMAC Mortgage, this is one of those too good to be true things. Heres the thing, I have no issues what-so-ever with GMAC, thats not what Im saying, what Im saying is there is a scam of sorts that is going around. A client of ours received a letter, we did a second mortgage for this person a few years ago, they received a letter from GMAC, it looked like GMAC, it sounded like GMAC, and it said that we are willing to forgive your second mortgage of 200 and some thousand dollars in lieu of a one time payment, payable within the next 30 days, of say 20 thousand dollars.

I dont recall the exact amount or what it was. There is a phone number on there, it says loss mitigation department on it, a person assigned to this case. They called the phone number, they answered the phone as if you were calling into the loss mitigation department, and verified if you just send us this amount they will release the lien. Well it is completely false. It is absolutely not true.

These people are not going to seek you out on their own, now whether it be GMAC, today we have actually seen that one, there may be other ones out there. Folks, if you are getting stuff like this you need to verify it and you need to verify it by sources other than the information on the letter that you have received. If you get an email that says your bank account has been tapped into you need to check, chances are it is some kind of a phishing scam and this is no different.

We have gone back to identity theft through the mail and if you have been a party to this you need to verify and check into it, and you need to contact the authorities immediately for more information, if you need help with this sort of situation you are welcome to give us a call at 480 Velocity.

It is pretty amazing that that kind of thing still exists, and with the announcement by Paulson today that the fact is they are no longer willing to buy bad mortgages off the books of the banks. When you come across a phishing scam such as this one there is not a bank out there, I dont care what kind of trouble they are in, that is going to take $0.10 on the dollar to forgive a loan.

In a situation where things are going well, you are right in a situation where things are going well, and the status quo, they are going to be pursued by an attorney, that is entirely different, they are not just going to volunteer up and give you the money, its not going to happen.

Absolutely not and thats where we get back into what a loan modification is, who it benefits, and how it works and so forth, you are starting to see these wheels in motion amongst all of these banks. One of those wheels is certainly not well forgive $200,000 in debt if you write us a check for $20, 000.

And when we have talked about this Brett you and I have had many conversations in regard to what does it take? Can a person do this on their own, we will get to that a little later, but the answer is Yes. A consumer can actually do it on their own, up until very recently with the new announcements made from some of these major servicers and investors, up until then, a person trying to do it on their own would take days upon days and hours and hours on the phone not getting calls back trying to find time during the day while working to get this done and in many cases they are going to get a temporary fix.

The loss mitigation department for the bank that you have your mortgage with, their job is not to mitigate your loss its to mitigate their loss. They are out to protect the bank, thats why we use the national network of attorneys that we do, that are specialists, that have done thousands of these loan modifications, that go to bat for you. By the way folks, they are not going through the loss mitigation door that you would have to go through they are going right to the legal department, they are going to threaten suit if necessary, they are going to do discovery work, they are going to find out if there was anything that was misrepresented either by the bank or the broker and take that angle…

Duration : 0:5:36

[youtube -pqeQ8k1TBE]

Part 8 (Excerpt)

The pitfall of forcing your bank to rescind your loan for lending violations

I have a question on that, it is my understanding and I could be wrong, but they dont need a copy of the note, they need the original note.

You are correct. Your attorney of course will get a copy, because they are not going to send them the original.

Items that your attorney is going to ask for, and I forget the number, I think its 47 different items that the attorney could ask for. Heres one. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and I just heard this term a couple months ago, it’s known as an alonge. What the heck is an alonge? Well apparently it’s one of the documents that has to be in the file.

While essentially the whole purpose of this is to catch the bank, the lender having messed up your loan somewhere along the way. Because if it is true that they violated some kind of Federal Law in the past when they gave you the loan or are in violation of the loan now, you can then take them to court. And you can sue them. You can have your loan rescinded. Which basically means it comes off your credit report. This loan never happened. As good as that sounds that may not be the best thing for the home owner.

I want to back up just a little tiny bit, you mentioned the alonge, there’s more to the alonge then it sounds like. The bank needs to have the original alonge, more importantly, the person who signed the alonge has to have been authorized by the licensed entity to sign that alonge. And I know for a fact that several people in this town, in this industry, were signing alonges because they needed it signed before the loans could fund. And they were not qualified to sign.

So let’s go back to this discovery process, when we find the lender has to rescind. And I will admit after being in the real estate and mortgage industry for over 20 years, I would have to say that almost 100% of the loans that are originated, if you look at them hard enough you could find something wrong with them. Something wrong, where there could be a reason for you to rescind this loan.

So let’s say you go to that point and push it and get the bank to rescind your loan. Here’s the problem. The loan is gone, it is no longer on your credit report, but let’s say you have a $200,000 loan you took out two years ago, in that time, you would’ve paid about $35,000 in interest. You get a credit for the 35,000, and let’s say you had attorney fees to fight the bank, let’s say $10,000, I don’t think it would be that high but we are just throwing out numbers here. And $5000 in closing costs when you bought the house, so that total is $50,000. You get a credit for $50,000 off of the $200,000 loan, which means you still owe $150,000 on the house. You have to pay the difference.

You have to pay back to the bank $150,000. So its nice that we filed suit and won but frankly in this market where are you going to get the $150,000 from? I think it would be very difficult to find a bank or lender right now that will lend you $150,000 for your house. Chances are you may be several months behind on your payment and although the lender cant show your payment history because the loan was rescinded more than likely the new bank is going to say they need a mortgage payment history. And you say you have been in the house for two years, but the loan got rescinded and they say you need payment history, you cant produce it.

In this marketplace today you are not going to get that loan done. And so the attorneys know that and that’s why once they get the lenders attention they say to the lender, we dont want to rescinded the loan, we dont want to incur a ton of attorney fees but we will if we need to, if you dont want to play ball with us. What we want to do is to work together to get the best possible loan modification for our clients. So we can keep them in their home, keep their family intact.

The reality of a it is, here what we are doing we are working with a national network of attorneys that care about you and you first.

You can go to http://mortgageanswerman.com where there’s going to be information about everything including, one thing I’ll add really quickly. I have something there that is known as a Decision Matrix. The Decision Matrix will walk you through step by step by step, every single step of the process regarding what you should do with your property, should you do a short sale, should you do loan modification, should you just let the bank foreclose? Is bankruptcy an okay idea for you, or not? What are the tax consequences?…

Duration : 0:6:54

[youtube LIi4Gqp9jNE]

Part 3 (Excerpt)

Re-Default rates on Forbearance Agreements done with banks reaches 58%

In studio with us today on this fine New years eve is Dan Havey, the co founder of the modification hotline as well as the author of The Foreclosure Sharks a great white paper he put together. He is also the author of Real Estates Future and this segment we are talking about loan modifications and some specific information.

You also have a great story to tell about this to. Well unfortunately I have too many stories about people who have had to go through foreclosures, bankruptcies, loan modifications. The one story I want to talk about real quick is a friend of mine who unbeknownst to me went out and did a loan modification on her own and not to get into a whole bunch of technical details on it she ended up getting a pretty decent interest rate because they actually cut her mortgage payment in half and she was pretty happy about that.

She owed a little bit more than the house was worth, she wasnt terribly upside down, but by the time they got done with her she certainly was going to be because the modification, and actually I should not call it a modification, I should call it a forbearance agreement, what they did to her was to say, OK we will cut your interest rate in half, we will cut your monthly payment in half, but we will take all of that deferred interest and tack it onto the back end of the loan. So that by the time her interest rate went back to where it had been, it was going to adjust up over the next five years, so that within that five year time period she was actually going to owe $60,000 in back interest on top of the principal balance that she had before she went to go talk to her bank.

What kind of a deal is that? I didnt think it was a very good one and she ended up eventually not taking it and just recently let the house go back to the bank, because she just looked at it and said, Wait a second here, I am already $20,000 upside down, by the time Im done with you guys I will be $80,000 upside down and so great I get a cheaper payment for a while. She moved into a rental property that was even cheaper then what she would have had to pay to stay in the house and from what she tells me the house is nicer.

Some of the unfortunate scenarios that come up that we get to see. Unfortunately we talk to lots of people that have similar situations, trying to do these on their own and it is possible to do a loan modification on your own. We know that, the program is designed for you to do that. The problem is it generally does not work out.

The re-default rate on loan modifications done on your own is significantly higher than loan modifications facilitated by an attorney that is representing you, for a number of reasons. Number one you have to pay an attorney to represent you. The other is that I think you are going to get a better modification based its not just a negotiation between you and the loss mitigation department for the bank. We are talking about using a professional attorney who is a trained negotiator to negotiate on your behalf with another attorney. By the way, theyre not talking to the same loss mitigation people in India that you may be talking too.

Here are some numbers that just came out from John Dugan who is the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and they did a study of the loan modifications that have been done to date. In many cases these were forbearance agreements, not loan modifications. If an individual talks to his bank, generally speaking he will not get the same as result as what an attorney would do, so most of these are really forbearance agreements. And in that case, 36% had defaulted or were 30 days past due after 6 months and 58% were in default after 8 months. Again that is 58% in default after eight months and I saw some numbers the other day and unfortunately I didnt bring them in with me today, that according to some study of the very few modifications that have been done using an attorney, I say very few, but it is still thousands or tens of thousands, but few compared to what is getting done directly with the bank, the number is only like 5% of the ones done with an attorney have re-defaulted and again I dont have the numbers with me so I cant site the source…

Duration : 0:5:47

[youtube fgNbwAE0TC8]

Part 7 (Excerpt)

Attorney negotiated loan modification process Going thru the Legal Door

We have Dan Havey with us talking about loan modifications. This segment we want to talk about the specifics of the actual mechanics of, how does it actually work for the homeowner? Let me just start it off and if you would then explain the back end of how it works. Our job is to determine where you’re at now, be very specific about where you’re at with your mortgage now, what the rate is, what it’s done, those specifics. How much you make? We have to help the lender with one thing which is to establish a hardship which is crucial to this. You can’t be making half $1 million a year paying $5000 a month in a mortgage, they are not just going to lower your interest rate because you want it. There actually has to be some sort of change, financial change, hardship.

We determined that and then there is a significant amount of paperwork involved, Velocity Financial takes care of that for you. We fill out the paperwork along with your help, review all of the documentation, we then recommend be right loan modification, whether it be an interest rate reduction, or extending the term of your loan, waiving some of the balance that you owe which is very very rare. To make sure that once we’re done with this whole process you can sustain and live in that house and be happy forever.

So the process itself really is not that much different than what people went through when they got their loan in the first place. That is correct and it’s kind of funny, this has to be exactly the reverse. There is paperwork that we need to collect on your mortgages, we check the value of the property to see where you’re at and in most cases youre underwater with the value. We dont do an appraisal though, there is no credit analysis, we do review your finances, and these sorts of things but essentially it’s just like doing a loan. What we’re trying to determine is exactly what is sustainable for you.

So what we do at the modification hotline at Velocity Financial is to put together the entire package, just like we do for a loan package because we basically send this to a underwriter, theyre not known as an underwriter they’re known as a loan modification coordinator but at modification hotline we are the first set of eyes. We work with you directly, getting all the paperwork in, getting it put together because we know exactly what has to be in that file, how it has to be stacked, how it has to be presented, before it goes to the loan modification coordinator who works for the attorney.

Then once it is at the attorneys office with their modification coordinator, they take a look at it, they make sure that everything is in there, they make sure that it is a doable modification. This all happens before it is ever presented to an attorney.

There are a whole lot of steps and there is a lot of paperwork. The process like you said is very similar to a loan with the exception that there are no costs of the title company and all that other stuff. Those dont exist, we dont charge an upfront fee, and we do collect a retainer for the attorney. At some point during our process we make our recommendations and we turn it in. Then the attorney does their due diligence and thats where I really want you to explain what happens, what are these attorneys looking for?

Well this is where it completely goes off track, versus what a homeowner would do if they were doing their own modification, because they would do everything we just talked about, they would fill out the paperwork, get together tax returns, pay stubs, whatever the lender wanted and they would present all of it to the lender. Now they probably wouldn’t know exactly how to stack some of the paperwork, and how to calculate some of the things that we know how to calculate, but they would put all that they work together.

Where the difference comes in is once it gets to the attorney because the attorney ultimately wants to get you a loan modification but they can’t just call up the bank and say hey I want loan modification, because he is going to get the same result you did. So what he has to do is he has to go through the file, and he has to look for things like, I am going to use a bunch of acronyms here, he’s looking for things like TILA, RESPA, HOEPA, HUD violations, all these different guidelines that the lender was required to meet while giving you the loan.

Duration : 0:6:47

[youtube Dcj9rMldlok]